WASHINGTON -- The
Church of Scientology plotted to silence a New York writer critical of
the organization by framing her to become the FBl's prime suspect in a
series of bomb threats, According to documents released yesterday.

Paulette Cooper,
37, said the scientologists' plot was part of a campaign of harassment
that led to her being indicted on criminal charges. She said she became
deeply depressed and was forced to seek psychiatric help.

Cooper said the church
began harassing her in 1969, when it learned she was working on a book
about it. Shortly after "The Scandal of Scientology" was published
in 1971, she was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges she sent
a bomb threat to church offices.

The charges were
dropped in 1975, but the harassment continued, she told a news conference
yesterday. And she finally volunteered to take sodium pentathol - truth
serum - to prove to prosecutors she was innocent of the bomb threats.

It was yesterday,
when US district judge Charles Richey made public thousands of documents
the FBI seized in 1971 raids, that Cooper got proof the church had tried
to smear her reputation.

A document dated
April 1, 1976, disclosed the church had plotted to frame Cooper as a perpetrator
of bomb threats.

The document described
a proposed "Operation Freakout," in which a scientologist with
a voice similar to Cooper's would phone an Arab consulate in New York
City, screaming obscenities and threatening, "I am going to bomb
you."

The plan also called
for sending a written bomb threat to an Arab embassy after scheming to
get Cooper's fingerprints on notepaper to be used for the threat. The
scientologists also plotted to send a member masquerading as Cooper to
a laundromat to make an angry bomb threat, then tip off the FBI, a document
showed. The goal of the plan, it indicated, was "to get P.C. (Paulette
Cooper) incarcerated in a mental institution or jail, or at least to hit
her so hard that she drops her attacks.''

The files were among
cartons of church files seized by the FBI that led to the indictment of
11 church members. Richey recently found nine members guilty of conspiring
to infiltrate US agencies and steal government documents.

This week an appeals
court rejected church claims that the FBI raids were too broad and approved
the public release of the documents, which detail scores of covert scientology
attacks on perceived enemies. The documents disclose that British-based
scientologists:

-- Besides
infiltrating the internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department,
plotted to steal State Department files pertaining to the church
and its founder, L. Hon Hubbard. -- Plotted to infiltrate the US
embassy in London to seek Sootland Yard reports about the organization.

-- Sought to
penetrate a company known as JWT Chicago, whose offices were in
Chicago's John Hancock building. To do so, the church traced "the
grandmaster key," which "will open all stairways, bathrooms
and offices in the building. The only peopIe who have a grandmaster
are the chief engineer, the security Supervisor and the building
manager," one memo said.

-- Created
negative ''media attacks" on est, a sensitivity training group
headed by Werner Erhard. The motive for this operation was not made
clear.

-- Learning
of state and local invesrigations of its activities in Hawaii, Massachusetts
and Oregon, plotted break-ins of government offices to monitor the
probes.

Cooper, who has filed
two lawsuits against the church seeking a total of $35 million in damages,
said there "is a constant confirmation" in the documents that
her allegations are accurate. She said she had spent $42,000 on legal
fees defending herself against 14 lawsuits filed by the church.

Cooper said there
was evidence the church assigned members "to date me to try to get
information about me." She said four "horrible, anonymous smear
letters were sent about me, including to the tenants in my apartment building."
One letter alleged she had a venereal disease.

She said two church
members were convicted for possessing burglary tools used in a break-in
of her lawyer's office in Toronto and "papers from my doctor's office
and my lawyer's office disappeared and were mailed to me and other people
anonymously for years."

Responding to the
disclosures about Cooper, church spokesman Dennis McKenna said: "This
situation is not in perspective until one examines the extent to which
Miss Cooper was covertly working with the FBI and other federal agencies"
to investigate the church.

Mr. Kenna said Cooper
was involved with federal agencies in "actions against the church"
similar to those the FBI conducted on private individuals in the J. Edgar
Hoover era.

Another scientology
official said the church "does not condone" the actions against
Cooper.